Reimagined covers of romance novels
Reimagined covers of romance novels. My favorites are “For the Love of Scottie McMullet” and “Lord of the Tube Socks”.
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kottke.org posts about books
Jeff Veen’s The Art and Science of
Jeff Veen’s The Art and Science of Web Design is 5 years old. To celebrate, he’s made a proof of the entire book available for download.
The difficulty of pre-ordering the new Harry Potter book online
The difficulty of pre-ordering the new Harry Potter book online. If the book is ordered online, how much after the midnight release will the book be delivered? Next day or wait until after the weekend?
Snow Crash
When I mentioned Neal Stephenson here in February, several people recommended starting with the smaller Snow Crash rather than plunging head-long into Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle. When I ran across a copy in my own household (who knew that we had one?), I picked it up and barely put it back down until I had finished. I mean — come on! — the main character’s name is Hiro Protagonist, but Stephenson has the chops to back that sort of cheesy bullshit up:
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity…
Roll model!
Aside from the entertaining writing, Snow Crash (excerpt) is packed full of ideas. Stephenson gives the reader as much to think about as do the authors of recent non-fiction books like Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, etc. And whereas Steven Johnson gets a bunch of shit for winkingly calling his book “Everything Bad is Good for You” and suggesting that this miserable culture we’re stuck with might be good for us in some way, readers of Snow Crash might say, “hmm, that’s an interesting idea” and ruminate on it without feeling the need to completely disagree with the whole premise of the book. Is fiction better at presenting ideas in a non-theatening manner than non-fiction? Maybe Gladwell’s next book should be a novel?
Fun new book from O’Reilly’s Hacks series: Astronomy Hacks
Fun new book from O’Reilly’s Hacks series: Astronomy Hacks. “This handy field guide covers the basics of observing, and what you need to know about tweaking, tuning, adjusting, and tricking out a ‘scope.”
Small corrections (from Dave Eggers) to Neal
Small corrections (from Dave Eggers) to Neal Pollack’s piece in the Times Book Review. Includes a response to the response from Neal.
Neal Pollack on how his literary persona
Neal Pollack on how his literary persona got out of hand. “For the last five years, I’ve lived with a dark, obnoxious fictional version of myself. It’s been an irritating time.”
Cory Doctorow’s new book, Someone Comes to
Cory Doctorow’s new book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is out today. As usual, the book is available for download under a Creative Commons license.
A project to offer free textbooks (as
A project to offer free textbooks (as opposed to the $120 ones you get at the college bookstore) is looking for some web design help. “In response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value, I have started this collection of the existing free textbooks and educational tools available online.”
The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World
The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World. The actual real world, not the MTV program.
Book critic Tanya Gold reads Rebbecca Ray’s 1000
Book critic Tanya Gold reads Rebbecca Ray’s 1000-page Newfoundland in one sitting. Hour 13: “I think my eyes are bleeding. Even commas make my face ache.”
Some additional questions and answers from the
Some additional questions and answers from the previously linked David Sedaris interview.
PBS to air three part series on
PBS to air three part series on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Collection of Chip Kidd’s book cover design
Collection of Chip Kidd’s book cover design work due out in October.
Rebecca is compiling a list of summer reading lists for 2005
Rebecca is compiling a list of summer reading lists for 2005.
A literary map of Manhattan
A literary map of Manhattan. “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked, and looked at ducks.”
Excerpt of The Washingtonienne’s self-titled novel
Excerpt of The Washingtonienne’s self-titled novel. Wow, that’s bad. She should have kept her day job.
Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock has
Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock has a book out about fast food.
New collection of nonfiction by David Foster
New collection of nonfiction by David Foster Wallace due out in December.
David McCullough’s 1776 and the tension between academic historians and popularizers
David McCullough’s 1776 and the tension between academic historians and popularizers. Also apropos to the scientists vs. pop science writers argument I’ve been hearing lately re: Blink and Everything Bad is Good for You.
Steve Leveen suggests that people stop finishing
Steve Leveen suggests that people stop finishing books they aren’t enjoying. Compares books to wine, says that we should “taste” a variety of books and only “drink” the ones we really like.
Gladwell reviews Everything Bad is Good for
Gladwell reviews Everything Bad is Good for You for the New Yorker.
Everything Bad is Good for You
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to read Steven Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad is Good for You:
Drawing from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and literary theory, Johnson argues that the junk culture we’re so eager to dismiss is in fact making us more intelligent. A video game will never be a book, Johnson acknowledges, nor should it aspire to be — and, in fact, video games, from Tetris to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto, have been shown to raise IQ scores and develop cognitive abilities that can’t be learned from books. Likewise, successful television, when examined closely and taken seriously, reveals surprising narrative sophistication and intellectual demands.
To me, the most interesting question about the whole issue is whether the kind of learning that Johnson focuses on in the book outweighs the potentially negative aspects of what is generally thought of as our dumbed down and getting dumber culture…in some ways, it’s a question of the importance of how we learn versus what we learn. Unfortunately, that question lies largely outside the scope of the book and is probably an entire book of its own, but I still asked Steven about it in an email I sent him shortly after finishing the book. Here’s a gently edited excerpt:
It was hard for me to read about pop culture making us smarter because I’m so conditioned to think otherwise, but in the specific way you describe, I absolutely agree with your arguments. There’s obviously a lot more effort and learning involved watching The Apprentice than in watching The Joker’s Wild. The gaming bit of the book even influenced my thinking on this post about Katamari Damacy.
I guess I’m still kind of wondering if the positive effect you talk about balances out the negative effects (if any). If TV these days is conditioning us to be more socially agile (as far as keeping track of social connections), what else is it conditioning us to think and feel? Maybe that’s outside the question of whether it’s making us smarter or not. I ran across this interview of David Foster Wallace from 1993 a couple of weeks ago, and Wallace is a notorious TV critic, although I think he would pretty much agree with most of EBIGFY:
“But what’s seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV’s seductions are. It’s seldom acknowledged that viewers’ relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound.”
But I don’t think he’d agree that TV is good for you:
“I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.”
Is media whose primary purpose (through, as you argue, the addition of complexity) is to spend more time in the lives of the people who consume it (through repeat viewings, game replayings, etc.) really good for people? I have doubts.
Near the end of the book, you offhandedly introduce the familiar metaphor of the media diet (I think it’s only mentioned once on p194). Dunno why exactly, but it really grabbed me. On the one hand, it’s taken for granted among people I know who tend to consume lots of media that media is something that needs be approached in a dietary sense. I need to read more or watch less TV or watch better TV or balance out my online reading with some books…that’s just how we think now. I don’t think that concept existed 20-30 years ago but now there’s so much media that we need to balance it all. Tying that back into food, the hunter gatherers wouldn’t have known what a balanced diet was because they were eating an all meat and wild fruit/veg diet, basically whatever they could get their hands on. When agriculture rolled around and was greatly enhanced by industrialization, we were overwhelmed by choice and the idea of a balanced diet became a possibility and necessity.
At the same time, we have a situation in the US now where food is engineered to maximize the amount purchased by an individual. That means larger portions of high-sugar, high-fat foods….lots and lots of stuff that tastes good and makes you want to eat more of it as soon as possible. And it’s making us fat and unhealthy. Media is engineered to work much the same way and I’m wondering if that’s a good thing.
For those that want to read more about it, the book and the ideas contained therein have been excerpted in a couple of places already:
- Watching TV Makes You Smarter (NY Times Magazine)
- Everything Bad Goes Public (stevenberlinjohnson.com)
- Dome Improvement (Wired magazine)
and is being discussed in various corners of the blogosphere and in the media:
-Comments on Watching TV Makes You Smarter (kottke.org)
- Comments on Everything Bad Goes Public (kottke.org)
- Sparklines (Almost) in the Times, and Complexity Is Good For You (Anil Dash)
- Get Smart (Reason Online)
- Thinking Outside the Idiot Box (Slate)
- sleeper curve economics (Michael Sippey)
- Are Video Games Good for You? (Michael J. Madison)
- Don’t kill your television (Salon)
- Children, Eat Your Trash! (Time)
- Does watching TV make you stupid? (Stay Free!)
- Brain candy (Boston Globe)
- Bad is Good (The Sunday Times)
And Steven is trying to keep up with it all on his web site.
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